Art Imitates Crochet

Posted on April 4, 2011 by dorischancrochet

When you spend most of your adult years running as fast as you can just so you don’t fall behind, it is too easy to lose touch with your childhood and allow your earliest friendships to slip away. I have gone through the usual life changes and even re-invented myself a couple of times, all the while never looking back.

Something made me attend my 30-year high school class reunion. Actually I know what that something was. Blame in on the net. Not long after I finally got internet access and began my first tentative on-line forays I did an uncharacteristic thing. I searched for and found schoolmates and through them discovered the plan to throw a reunion bash.

I had been warned against high school reunions. The prevailing attitude was that if you left certain friends behind then there would be little to no chance that they’d have any place in your current life. Suzanne is my brilliant example of the exception that proves the rule.

We became nearly immediate friends at the beginning of 7th grade in junior high and continued to be mates and co-conspirators through high school graduation. Suzanne “Spidey” Halstead (nee Hausmann) and I shared great times, many involving music. We trod the boards acting and performing in plays, musicals, talent shows, concerts. I dug up these images, not our biggest or best roles, but they are the only pictures I have of us. OK, so it wasn’t High School Musical or Glee, but it was fun.

Bottom row, that's Suzanne second from the left, me on the right end.

Suzanne and me, senior year talent show

Suzanne was my designated vocalist for the first and only public performance of a song I wrote, which I couldn’t sing myself while playing the keyboard. That experience taught me that I shouldn’t play piano or write songs either. Really. But she was terrific.

Fast forward to today, where Suzanne and I have reconnected after all this time. As completely different as those intervening 30 years were for each of us, we found much common ground. Happily we live close enough to each other to meet regularly for coffee and decompression at the mall. (Neither of us likes the mall, but the location is convenient.)

Although I count many many crochet confidantes and good friends in my life today, all are unconnected to my life B.C. (Before Crochet)… that is all except for Suzanne, who was there while I trembled on the brink of this new career as a crochet designer. I like to think that we both have artistic souls, me in my yarnish way and Suzanne as a real artist and art educator. Over the past years since the reunion we’ve swapped craft for art; I have gifted her crochet shawls and designs and she has presented me with her artwork, oil pastels, paper, prints and… well… art stuff.

The need to earn a living had constantly trumped her desire to do her art. Only recently has Suzanne the artist blossomed in a beautiful way. Last week I had the pleasure of attending a reception celebrating her first gallery showing, an exhibit of many of the oil pastels published in her inspirational book project, Drawing Nearer.

Why I treasure Suzanne so dearly is not simply because she is a wonderful, talented and true friend but, because she is not of my crochet world, she can put everything I do into a different perspective, specifically into the perspective of an artist. For example, in 2008 she gave me this oil pastel for my birthday and asked me to describe what I saw. My first impulse was to hold it this way:

In my geeky space cadet way I thought alien landscape or deep sea scape, post-apocalyptic city scape, purple mountains majesty. She gently suggested that I turn it around to look like this:

Now I saw the Carina Nebula. Stalactites. Living alien ships.

Suzanne will be the first to assure you that the meaning of art resides solely in the eye/mind/heart of the beholder and that any interpretation is valid. However, when she explained what she was thinking about when she created “Patterned Light”, I had to bust out laughing.

This is an homage inspired by and representational of the way in which the light from a window plays through the fabric of her favorite window valence. Which happens to be one of my crocheted shawls. 🙂

Gotta love her.

However, I will continue to see the Carina Nebula.

That… or a girly Romulan Bird-of-Prey.

I am such a geek.

Non-Crochet Math Needed

Posted on March 22, 2011 by dorischancrochet

Strictly hypothetically speaking, let’s say a … ahem… friend of mine has seven pairs of Converse All-Stars Chuck Taylor high-tops in different exceptionally bright colors. Please do not judge at this point.

Let’s posit that this Chuck-obsessed person never wants to wear these beauties in mated pairs. After all, orange on both feet might feel pedestrian. But in the interest of fairness, for state occasions and under extreme peer pressure, matching shoes would be considered as a last resort.

: Photo courtesy of Alex Iannelli

Here’s the part where you help me… uh, I mean… this person crunch the numbers. How many combinations are possible:

If the least restrictions are applied… any pairings
If the pairs are never matched
If you don’t count mirror image pairs (for example Pink left/Yellow right and Yellow left/Pink right are counted as one combination)

Please do not belittle my computational skills. Where crochet is concerned I can usually wrap my brain around most number problems. If the stitch repeat is 3.75 inches wide, how many repeats should be created in order to achieve garment sizes from XS to 3XL? What if there must be 2″ positive ease and no partial repeats? What if the number of repeats must be a multiple of 2? A multiple of 4? That I can do.

But I admit that I so suck at sneaker math it’s not funny and my head hurts. This Chuck problem keeps going round and round. Is there some elegant formula that gives me the magic number? Short of pulling out all seven pairs and lining them up and counting, I am totally confused here. Please, I need some sleep.

Link

>Have I mentioned that one of the perks of being a crochet designer is that I never have to match any other crocheter’s gauge? Given that I design the project, make the sample garment and write the pattern, I am allowed the luxury of setting the gauge. I never realized how empowering it has become being the one to dictate the number of inches per a specific count of stitches or stitch pattern repeats. It tends to make one unspeakably smug and self-righteous. Can’t match my stated gauge using the exact same yarn? Too bad. Want to substitute another yarn? Good luck with that!

All of it, every single fracking hubris-laden moment of my designing career, has returned to bite me in the butt. This month I have promised to release the next design for my independent pattern line, DJC2: Tank Girl. I started working on Tank Girl not that long ago while the Northeast was still in the grip of stinging winter cold, snow and ice. At the time it seemed like a good idea to offer Tank Girl in a warmer, cozier fiber as a layering vest. So the design began with the wonderful yarn in hand, Spud & Chloe Fine, a fingering weight blend of superwash wool and silk that probably makes awesome socks, too. And, for fun, I also sampled a tank in Kollage Sockalicious, which is a softer, plumper yarn but worked perfectly to the same gauge.

Sample in DMC Senso, fine gauge

The universe being what it is, a gang of cosmic forces kept me from completing Tank Girl right away. So now the seasons are threatening to change and think I should switch gears, stay ahead of the curve and make my tank samples more spring/summer-like. I tossed the stash looking for substitute fingering weight yarns in cotton or blends with cotton, linen, bamboo, whatever would work to gauge and be kid-friendly, washable and durable. I discovered that there aren’t a lot of choices for comfortable, easy-care yarns in this weight class, at least not to be found in this house. So I amassed a few that came the closest and swatched them all.

Imagine my dismay when none of my intended swaps would work to gauge, partly due to the fact that wool and animal fiber yarns have some give or stretch, whereas cotton and other plant fibers have none. Also, most animal fibers have some surface texture and stick-to-itself qualities that many plant fibers do not. Whatever the reasons, I found I could get the cotton/plant yarn swatches to match either stitch gauge or row gauge but not both. I switched hook sizes. I switched hook styles. I wound and rewound balls in case the tension off the skeins was making any difference. I cursed, I prayed. I did everything except crochet standing on my head and still I could not get any of the non-wool, warm weather choices to match my own gauge.

What I swatched:

DMC Senso, a soft blend of microfiber and cotton that is listed as a Size 3 crochet thread. Not a thread, trust me. It is a lovely fingering weight yarn and is terrific for fashions.
Aunt Lydia’s Size 3 Crochet Cotton, not as soft but workable.
Red Heart Lustersheen, a cabled acrylic fingering weight, very soft, a better color range than the cotton threads.
Elsebeth Lavold Hempathy, a sportweight blend of hemp, cotton and rayon; not as fine as the above, but would make a terrific spring tank.
Tahki Cotton Classic Lite, a sportweight mercerized cotton in awesome colors, but a touch heavier than all of the above.

DMC Senso, Spud&Chloe Fine, Tahki Cotton Classic Lite Swatches

I also tried a few fingering weight yarns that I’d be loathe to use for kid wear. Fine gauge silk and fine gauge linen. Still no joy. Looking at the swatches this way, it doesn’t seem as though there’s much difference, but when the gauge is multiplied over the width and length of a garment, it really gets messed up.

Tahki Cotton Classic (pink), Kollage Sockalicious (blue)

Elsebeth Lavold Hempathy (green), Spud&Chloe Fine (pink)

My solution? Heck, if the yarn won’t come to the gauge, then re-tool the gauge to fit the yarn. This would not be possible in traditional pattern publishing where space is a limiting factor. We don’t worry about word count in download land, which leaves me free to offer as many sets of instructions in as many gauges and variations as necessary to cover the bases for the range of yarns you might want to use.

It’s going to be a crap-ton of work, but worth the extra pages, trust me. Barring any unforeseen shifts in the universe, you should be able to find DJC2: Tank Girl, a seamless, lacy layering vest sized for girls, tweens and teens, in a couple of weeks at www.designingvashti.com.

>Good/Not Good Crochet Precedent Set

Posted on February 4, 2011 by dorischancrochet

>Happy Chinese New Year! Gung Hei Fat Choy, as I would say in Cantonese, but the spelling is suspect. That dialect of Chinese is incredibly and notoriously difficult to write out. Chinese is a tonal language, so the same phoneme (syllable) spoken with a different intonation, rising, falling, dipping or high, means something different. Mandarin, now the national dialect, has just those four tones. I believe Cantonese has five. That’s probably why Cantonese sounds so sing-song; it actually IS a song.

That makes for tons of puns due to those homonyms. The sound “ma” can mean mother or horse, depending on the inflection. Be careful how you call your mom, huh? It is also the basis of many traditions and superstitions. For example, the word for the number four sounds like the one for death. Needless to note, four is not a lucky number in China. One of the reasons that red is the happy, lucky auspicious color is that the word for red sound like the one for prosperity. Makes perfect sense.

In fact, Gung Hei Fat Choy does not translate as Happy New Year, exactly. It sort of means “congratulations and be prosperous”. The prosperity part is incredibly important. But mostly New Year is for eating and connecting with family and honoring ancestors. And eating. For most people the party can go on for at least a week, but strictly speaking, New Year season is 15 days long.

I digress. One of the traditions I observed while growing up in a Chinese American household was that the things you do during New Year set the precedent for the whole year. So if you cry, you will be crying all year. It’s not like the Western thing, the New Year’s resolution. You can make all the resolutions you want, but it’s always up to you to make it so, know what I’m saying? There is an element of personal choice involved after the fact. With the Chinese tradition, you’re rather stuck. New Year karma. So my parents impressed on me the idea that if you are bad, messy, loud or hungry (as if that would ever happen!), then that’s how it’ll be for the rest of the year, no do-overs.

I forgot all about that today. Dang it. I should have gotten all the horrible work done before New Year and set this day aside to do pleasurable, fun, happy stuff. Instead I’ve been getting to tasks that are not my favorites: crochet pattern writing, housecleaning, laundry, pattern writing, updating my design pages at Ravelry, responding to crochet design questions and complaints. Did I mention pattern writing?

Put in another perspective, the only way I can conduct my design business is to write patterns for my crochet creations. Crochet patterns = prosperity. So if I find myself doing pattern writing all year, that can only mean I will earn some fees. This is not a bad thing. Fat Choy, Fat Choy!

However, there are so many other things I could do, better precedents to set for myself. So, in hindsight, here’s my list of stuff I should be doing today for a truly happy new year:

Crocheting. Instead of writing crochet, I really should like to do crochet, now and all year long. Chances are I will anyway, but it might be good to have New Year luck on my side!
Toasting with some bubbly wine, either a Spanish Cava or maybe an Italian Asti.
Consuming mass quantities of chocolate.
Talking to my friends and family. I consider myself a low-maintenance kind of person, but every once in a while it’s good to reach out and connect. It lets them know you are still breathing.
Eating cake. Not baking that cake, though. Baking results in delicious products, yes. But the process entails work, mess, clean-up, which should not be my fate for the entire year.
Browsing and buying yarn, hand candy. No rationalization needed.

Not a superstitious person in the least, I still have that little nagging suspicion in the back of my mind that maybe there’s something to it. So instead of blogging any more I think I’m going to wander off and enjoy setting some other precedents. 🙂

>Colloquial Crochet: Yarn By Any Other Name

Posted on January 8, 2011 by dorischancrochet

>As a writer, I am all for having fun with language and amuse myself finding other ways to say the same thing. This approach is not always appreciated by editors who would rather I use fewer words and a less colloquial, more formal tone in my prose. And I agree that much of the crochet writing I produce (think patterns) has to be clean, clear, pithy, precise, concise and…. well… boring. But this is the blogosphere, the wild west, where anything goes and usually does. I understand that using jargon, slang and euphemism in writing may mean that some readers will not understand what the frack I’m talking about. I can live with that.

Obviously the way we speak is not the way we are supposed to write. What I was taught in school, Standard American English composition, today seems static to the point of moribundity. In contrast, spoken American English, like all living languages, is dynamic and constantly changing to meet the needs and coolness of the speakers. I don’t say we should have no standards for grammar, syntax, usage, spelling and such. I do say that there is a richness, texture and much humor to be found in personality prose, what I call this relaxed style. I guess I want to express my joy and relief that I don’t have to obey all the rules here.

Naturally, we invent the greatest number of non-standard terms and euphemisms for the things that most interest us, what we humans think about and obsess over or are not allowed to talk about in plainer English. For instance, there must be hundreds, no, thousands of slang terms for sex, the internet, bodily functions and parts, sex, technology. Illicit activities and substances. Money. Hokey smokes, I can easily bang out at least two dozen words for money or dollars. Bucks, buckos, buckaroos, simoleons, greenbacks, green (which probably doesn’t make sense in countries where currency is multicolored), smackers, clams, cabbage, kale, bananas, coconuts, dough, bread, potatoes, beans, bacon, cheddar, guacamole, lettuce (this is beginning to sound like a fast food order!), moolah, filthy lucre, dinero, paper, scratch, wad, Jacksons, Benjamins/Franklins (although I think only bank tellers and drug dealers ever handle those any more) and the related terms dead presidents and big faces.

Another category of slang I can appreciate addresses lack of either intelligence or sanity. Colorful and evocative, all deliver the sting of insult without being mean about it. So instead of saying stupid, brainless twit we can use dim bulb, low pressure zone, not firing on all eight (or all six), not the sharpest crayon in the box. I like some of the alternatives to crazy such as loony tunes, bats in the belfry, lights on-nobody home, bonkers, wacko, space cadet and my favorite, a french fry short of a Happy Meal.

Some words are more potent in print because they are difficult to pronounce or would come off as too effete in speech. I use lots of scary words in writing that I’d never say in conversation because I am not an asshole. And I have to agree that most colloquialisms are better heard than viewed in print because our voices carry important cues for emphasis, emotional content and nuances that can’t be typed in, except perhaps by the lame use of emoticons. 🙂 But since I “read” out loud in my head, I can still crack myself up in writing, no problem.

So (here’s the payoff), we have a million thousand slang words for this other stuff that’s important to us, like sex and money. Why are there no happy, amusing slang terms for yarn? Yarn is something I think about all the time. Don’t you? I find myself typing the word y-a-r-n so often that the labeling on those keys has worn off. This annoys my partner no end. He types by hunt and peck and if he can’t see which key is “A” then he is totally lost. It would be nice to give some of those other keys more action, to kind of even things out.

A better question would be, do we actually need a euphemism for yarn? Is yarn considered shameful or taboo in any way? That would depend on your upbringing and how big your stash is, I suppose. But wouldn’t it be cool to have our own word?

Imagine the possibilities. “OMG, that LYS gives great [yarn]!”. “This cashmere [yarn] is to die for.” “Did you [yarn] today?” “So much [yarn], so little time.”

I’m gonna work on it. Slang for the “Y” word. Something that doesn’t have the letters Y, A, R or N in it, please. Just saying….